Live Search Update Mashup

Yahoo who? In the midst of all the acquisition chatter, Microsoft's Live Search team continues to innovate. Greg Sterling gives a quick wrap-up of the recent Live Search changes (complete with links to the appropriate MSN Blogs).

First up is an update to frequency and speed of the MSNBot. Faster and more frequent crawling means that Live Search will be better at finding fresh content for searchers. The bot is also reminding Webmasters to keep their robots.txt files updated.

Meanwhile, Live Search is rolling out more detailed links for large Web sites (a la sitelinks). Called "deep links," they've actually been showing up since September 2007, but expect more of them in the wild now. And Microsoft has also begun promoting Live Search Products, a dedicated comparison shopping engine--though the indexed images and reviews have been showing up in core search for some time.